Impact (4 page)

“Under the theory that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it,” he began, looking not at Dawkins but at the emptied jury box, “I offer my résumé. I grew up here in Altoona, went away to school and, for reasons that aren't important anymore, came back a dozen years later. I'd spent seven years in Berkeley—the civil rights movement was in full swing, lawyers were going south in droves to integrate everything from beaches to buses, the antiwar movement was under way as well. Since I believed in those things, too, I came home determined to change Altoona the way some of my classmates were changing Jackson and Montgomery.”

Dawkins was transfixed. “So what happened?”

“I did what any ambitious lawyer does—I sued everyone in sight. I sued the welfare office over its hearing procedures. I sued the police department because its entrance requirements discriminated against blacks. I sued the jail because it was so crowded it was cruel and unusual punishment to keep someone in there overnight, and I sued the grade school for opening each session with the Lord's Prayer. I even sued the city to let a girl play Little League baseball.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing, in theory—I won most of those cases—but in reality it made me a stranger. I wasn't that nice Tollison kid who'd gone off to college, the local boy making good. I was a troublemaker. I was naïve, of course—I thought people would eventually appreciate or at least respect what I was trying to do—but it turned out the only people who admired my efforts were drunk drivers and dope dealers and mental cases, since they were the only ones coming through the office door. People believed that because I defended my clients I was advocating their causes, when all I was advocating was their right to some civil liberties and a fair trial.”

The courthouse clock chimed four funereal peals. Tollison paused, suddenly embarrassed. “So that's why Mr. Mitchell and I showed up here this morning,” he concluded quickly, “and why I'll be in here tomorrow with another one just like him.”

In the sudden silence, Dawkins glanced at his watch and slid off the table. “Thanks for the history lesson. There are some things about the world I'd like to change, too. But maybe Altoona's not the place to do it.”

Tollison shrugged. “I never tried it anywhere else.”

“Why not? Why didn't you move away?”

“Because I fell in love,” was the answer he stopped himself from uttering. Instead, he shook his head.

Dawkins stuck out a hand. “I better run. Glad I got to know you better, even though I didn't make much of an impression.”

“Tell the boys upstairs hello.”

Dawkins moved off down the aisle, doubtlessly wondering how he was going to explain the dismissal to his boss, the press, and the local chapter of M.A.D.D.

Tollison grabbed his briefcase and wandered out into the afternoon. Ordinarily, a successful trial produced an electric surge that boosted him through the rest of the week and kept him from taking his savings out of the local S&L and buying a cabin in the Sierras and fishing out his life. But not today. Today he could not escape the longing revived by his indulgence with young Dawkins or the regret sparked by what he had just accomplished in court.

In what passed for social circles in the town, Tollison was considered an ogre. Altoonans weren't disposed to forgive him for putting Larry Mitchell back on the streets, just as they weren't disposed to forgive Larry Mitchell for being a drunk. Consistent with the precepts of the pseudo-Christian renaissance, Altoonans were only disposed to forgiving themselves.

The state had screwed up, so Larry Mitchell was free. It was that simple for Tollison, though not for his neighbors, to whom the state merited endless license and excuse unless it zeroed in on them. As long as judgment would descend on others, they were willing to let guilt be determined by hunch and hearsay, prejudice and surmise. But when
they
got into trouble, they hurried to the lawyer most adept at exploiting the safeguards so deplored when less worthy persons sought refuge in them. The irony was that Altoona was so damn small and its legal fraternity so damn conservative, the lawyer they rushed to most often was him.

Tollison squinted in the sunlight and glanced down the block. When he saw the woman who was walking toward him, head down, brow knit, contemplating a conundrum that apparently trotted before her like a dachshund on a leash, he smiled. As he had been doing figuratively for a decade, he put himself squarely in her path.

“I'm sorry, I …” She zigged to avoid him.

“Damn. One more step and it would have been the most intimate encounter I've had all week.”

Startled, Laura Donahue brushed a lock of caramel-candy hair away from her robin's-egg eyes, then held up her hands to block out enough spring sunlight to enable her to recognize him. “Keith. I'm sorry, I was thinking about something else. Did I hurt you?”

“Only because you tried so hard to get out of my way.”

Matching his smile, she lowered her hands and stuffed them into the pockets of her satin jacket, a burnt-orange balloon around a thick white sweater. “Were you in trial?” she asked carefully. Then, because their circumstances made Altoona ominous, her eyes flicked up the block as his looked down.

He nodded.

“Did you win?”

He nodded again.

“You always do, don't you?”

“Not always. And even when I win, I lose.” When she frowned, he shook his head to forestall explanation. “So how are you?”

“Fine.”

“Long time no see, I believe.”

She looked toward the neon announcement of a bar called Blackstone's. “I know. I was going to call you last night, but I haven't been sleeping too well, so I went to bed early.”

“Why no sleep?”

She shrugged an ironic tilt. “Life seems to have gotten awfully
crowded
lately. There are all these arrangements to be made.” Her lips flicked a stunted grin. “Do you suppose they have efficiency experts in adultery? Give workshops on it, maybe?” When she saw his look, she hurried on. “Plus, I keep hearing things out in the yard that only seem to make noise when Jack's away.”

He struggled to remain unfazed. “I didn't know Jack was out of town.”

Nodding, she evaded his gaze.

“Where is he?”

“L. A.”

“When did he leave?”

“Sunday.”

“Why didn't you—”

She hurried from the question. “He's convinced he finally got the financing for his resort lined up. He was very excited when he called the other night.”

As Tollison struggled to make sense of what she said, the sun, like her revelations, became too much for him. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Let's go over there.”

He pointed to a bench in the park beyond the courthouse, but she pulled away and shook her head. “Not here, Keith.”

He dropped his hand. “We need to talk, Laura.”

“I can't; I don't have time.” She finally faced him. “I know I should have told you Jack was going away. I know we should have … taken advantage. I wanted to, but—”

A car passed and honked. They both looked and, recognizing the driver as the local baker, both waved. In face of another reminder of the need for caution, Tollison retreated. “It's just that I thought this was what we've been waiting for.”

Again she brushed hair from her eyes, which had become as insubstantial as her explanation for avoiding him. “It was. But you were in Sacramento Monday night, and you know how it gets when you're by yourself—I got drugged on solitude. These
fantasies
kept rolling through my head, images of everything I can imagine happening to me over the next twenty years. Some were thrilling and some were terrifying and I finally decided to stop thinking altogether. I gobbled Cheetos and took bubble baths and listened to Johnny Mathis records and watched Cary Grant movies.” Her grin became elfin. “It was wonderful. Now I know why you go fishing so often.”

He sought solace in the narrow beauty of her face. “I guess what I need to know is if there's a message in all that for me.”

The response seemed bittersweet. “Just that I love you very much.”

The yearning in her voice made him want to press her to his chest, Altoona be damned. “Can I come over tonight?”

She shook her head. “Tonight's the museum benefit.”

“Christ. Tomorrow, then?”

“Jack gets home this evening. We're supposed to go to Bodega Bay with the Ewings tomorrow.”

She reached for his hand and stroked it in an unaccustomed burst of daring. “Are you taking Brenda to the dance?”

He nodded absently, still plotting a rendezvous.

“Do you think I could catch a ride? Jack said he might not be in till late, and I hate driving up our road after I've been drinking.”

“Why don't you just skip it?”

“I'm on the committee, so I have to be there. But I thought if we all went together it might help our cause. Or would that be pressing our luck? Assuming we still have some.”

Tollison considered it. “It might be a good idea, if I can get Brenda to buy it. I'll check with her and give you a buzz. What time?”

“Eight?”

“Fine.” In a surge of desperation, he looked at his watch. “Uh, what are you doing for the next hour or so?”

His intent was so obvious she grinned. That she frequently laughed with delight when they made love had been an unexpected blessing, but his pleasure in memory quickly waned—they were not yet to where it was impossible to believe that it would all end woefully.

“I have to get my hair done,” she was saying.

“But I need to see you.”

“I know; I need to see you, too. I'll find time next week. I promise.”

“Early
next week. Monday.”

“If I can.”

She looked at the courthouse clock. “I have to go. André doesn't allow us to be late.”

“Fuck André.”

Her eyes closed. “Don't, Keith. Please. I'm relying on you to keep us from doing something dumb in all this.”

Tollison started to turn away, then stopped in the certainty that crucial information lay just below the surface of their encounter. He began to speak without thinking, juggling words frantically to make her linger. “So Jack's finally going to get rich. He's been talking about that resort thing forever—I can't believe someone finally took him up on it.”

Laura shrugged. “He's convinced he's got enough money, so construction can begin by the end of summer and a year after that he'll open the doors. I find it incredible, to tell you the truth. Jack is, well, he's no wizard or anything. I mean, you ought to know, right?”

Tollison knew, all right. He had grown up with Jack Donahue, right here in Altoona, back before the boom. He had been the football star; Jack, the champion sprinter. He, the reticent lummox; Jack, the gregarious jokester. He, the diligent student; Jack, the beneficiary of the athletic director's sway over the teaching staff. He was the offspring of a small-town lawyer and his dutiful wife who helped with the office typing; Jack had sprung from a pair of wastrels who lived in a rusty house trailer and pursued a succession of rickety enterprises that finally collapsed into a heap of fraud and insolvency. Once Jack had left for college, his parents and their trailer had been run out of town by the sheriff, acting at the behest of a dozen creditors.

Too envious of each other to become either enemies or friends, he and Jack Donahue left Altoona at the same time, after high school graduation, in the summer of 1958. A dozen years later, as though in response to a cosmic prompt, they had both returned. Over the long years since, they had not exchanged a word that wasn't required by the mores of the town they lived in.

In the interim, Tollison had gone to Cal, then law school, then the public defender's office in San Francisco, where he learned how to work a jury as he learned how little he liked slaving away in a metropolis where you could only see the sun by looking up. After progressing from defending panhandlers to defending psychopaths, Tollison had left the inefficiencies of the city for the law-and-order verities of the D.A's office in Altoona, the timing prompted less by his distaste for San Francisco than by his father's tearful plea.

With shock and anger but surprisingly little sympathy, Tollison learned that in his absence, his father had invested the family assets in a silver-futures scheme and had diverted a client's trust fund when the investment became worthless. Swallowing the remainder of his pride, Cliff Tollison had called on his son to come home to ward off the bar association, the district attorney, and the beneficiaries of the trust. The wrangle lasted for five years. A month after the final claim was settled, his father died from a stroke. His mother had, in every waking moment since, looked to her son to redeem her fallen name.

Meanwhile, Jack Donahue had gone to San Francisco State, where he drifted in and out of a series of sixties life-styles, from antiwar activism to an urban commune grounded in polygamy to, some would later say, a profitable dealership in synthetic hallucinogens. A few even suggested that Jack had eventually become a narc, squealing on his pals to escape prosecution for his own misdeeds, returning to Altoona mostly to escape retribution. Tollison didn't know and didn't particularly care. What he knew was that he had brought a law degree back with him and Jack had brought back Laura. At any moment since, Tollison would have gladly exchanged their trophies.

Laura was regarding his silence with alarm. “Right,” he agreed again. “Jack's no wizard, but he's an overachiever, I'll give him that. And he's lucky. I just wish the bastard would stop treating you like—”

Her dark look silenced him. “What is it?” he demanded. “What's happened?”

“He knows. Or thinks he does.”

“Jack? About us?”

She nodded. “You know how we've tried to figure out whether he did or not? Well just before he left, he said that since I'd be alone for a week I wouldn't have to slither out of town the way I usually did. I could invite you over and play house to my heart's content.”